Friday, December 30, 2011

During my childhood I had one encounter with the old Penn Station in New York City; it was, and I mean this without irony, awesome. The design, by McKim, Meade & White, was based on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Its destruction in 1963 gave life to the historic preservation movement in the City and elsewhere, and led to the enactment of the City's Landmarks Preservation Law, which became a model for similar laws in other cities. It also fostered the growth of organizations like the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

There is a plan, now partly funded, to restore at least some of the former splendor of Penn Station as a gateway to the City. This is to use presently unused space in the existing Farley Post Office Building, a massive neoclassical structure that stands above the tracks leading into Penn Station, to create a new passenger concourse and boarding area. This would be called "Moynihan Station" in honor of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who proposed and worked to secure funding for it. A New York University film student, Mitchell Goulding, became interested in Moynihan Station and visited the Landmarks Conservancy, where he gathered the material for the video above. As a railfan, and particularly a Pennsylvania Railroad enthusiast, I appreciate his inclusion of shots of GG1 electric locomotives, which the Pennsy used on passenger trains between New York and Washington and west to Harrisburg, as well as of a K-4 steam locomotive in the autumn of its years, having been displaced by diesels for mainline passenger service, pulling what appears to be a commuter train, probably in New Jersey.

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About Me

I narrowly missed being that rara avis for my generation, a native Floridian, when the U.S. Army closed its hospital in Tallahassee, shortly before my mother’s due date. She went home, and I was born in a city renowned in Vaudeville humor: Altoona, Pennsylvania. In that chilly March of 1946, the first sound to reach my infant ears from outside the hospital walls was likely the shriek of a steam locomotive’s whistle. This could explain my lifelong love of trains. Four surface crossings of the Atlantic in childhood also led to fascination with ships and the sea.

My father was in the military, so our family (I was an only child) went from place to place often in my early years. I was in England from the ages of five to eight (the first newspaper headline I recall reading is “KING DIES”; the King in question being George VI, father of Elizabeth II) and began my formal education in a rural county council (what we call “public”) school, where I probably escaped having my bottom caned only because the headmistress feared creating an international incident. Other places where I lived while growing up were Miami, San Antonio, Cheyenne, the Florida panhandle and Tampa.

I graduated from the University of South Florida (B.A., 1967) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1970). After that, apart from two years' duty in the U.S. Army, I practiced law in New York City. I worked in law firms and as in-house counsel, and served on the boards of directors of an insurer and a reinsurer. On a volunteer basis I now write for Brooklyn Heights Blog and the Brooklyn Bugle, and also publish my own blog, Self-Absorbed Boomer, which has been described as "relentlessly eclectic." In 1991, I married Martha Foley, an historian and archivist. We live in Brooklyn Heights. Our daughter, Elizabeth Cordelia Scales, also lives in Brooklyn.